“Oh yeah?” Mike said in an accent as flawlessly American as Alex’s. “What about Kennedy? He screwed anything in a skirt.”
“And they whacked him,” Alex said.
Mike got the message, though he’d never bought the idea of a conspiracy theory — some big organizational plan to get Kennedy — even though he did think for one man to get away three shots at a moving target in a few seconds was tough to do. He, Alex, and every other “apprentice” at Spets training school in Novosibirsk had tried it. Alex had been the fastest and most accurate, blowing Kennedy’s head off three times in a row. But that wasn’t why he’d been chosen as the “foreman,” nor had he been chosen because he could do a floater if needed. No — Alex’s outstanding quality was his ability to sustain the long view, to bide his time through all the Gorbachev-Yeltsin turbulence and to hold the others to it.
Whoever shot the floater, Alex told Mike, was unimportant. The point was, he couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants and he paid for it. “Drew too much attention to himself. Put everybody at risk.”
They saw Stefan, a wiry man well over six feet with what the doctors had told him was poor posture — stooped “from ducking doorways,” Mike joked. Stefan was a tradesman, too, an electrician from upstate, but he always wore a jacket and tie that made him look like a small businessman. He was standing by the monkey cage watching one of the animals sitting high on the loops, the monkey ignoring them, peering down into his crotch, grooming himself. Alex could smell Stefan’s breath as he approached him and tried not to make a face. Here Stefan was, living in the most advanced industrial country on earth, the home of the brave and dental floss, and he wouldn’t take care of his teeth. But it was a subject that Alex, for all his hard-nosed Spets training, couldn’t bring himself to broach, though he did move around Mike so that he was upwind as they stood either side of Stefan.
“Look at his red ass!” Stefan said.
“Yeah,” Mike said. “He’s a party monkey.”
“How big’s the park?” Alex asked flatly, and he wasn’t smiling at Mike’s little joke. Stefan, immediately sensing Alex was in his usual all-business mood, answered, “Eight hundred and forty-three acres.” Then Stefan asked his question. “How many blocks?”
Despite being upwind, Alex had to turn away from Stefan’s bad breath before answering. “Fifty-one blocks.”
Chernko in Novosibirsk, obsessed by the possibility of infiltration, insisted that every cell go through the formality of such a preset exchange after an American look-alike years ago had penetrated the Walker ring in Vienna on appearance alone.
The formality over, Alex suggested the three of them walk down to the reservoir.
“Christ, if I’d known that,” Stefan complained, adjusting the porkpie corduroy hat that made him look strangely elfish despite his height, “I could have met you at Eighty-fourth Street.”
“I like to walk,” Alex said, and offered Stefan a chestnut — maybe that’d help his breath.
“No thanks — makes my throat itchy. Listen, I know this is it, but which one do we take care of? Eeny, meeny, miney, mo?”
“What do you care?” Alex asked, unsmiling. “All you need to know is how to work your end.”
“Don’t worry about me, Alexi,” Stefan said. “Could do it with my eyes closed. Just like to know how many are going down, that’s all. We’re lucky Johnny Ferrago didn’t get to tell them anything.” Ferrago had been the foreman of another cell. They’d done their job poisoning the New York water supply earlier in the war, but Ferrago had ended up being taken out in a SWAT team firefight.
Alex quietly stepped to his left on the pathway to let a weaving ghetto blaster with skateboard attached fly through them. Closing the gap, he told Stefan, “All four of ‘em,” his tone unchanged. “Rush hour’s the best time for eeny. Meeny, early morning between two and three. Miney and mo anytime after that. Have you got the rats ready?” he asked Stefan.
“Yeah. Listen, Alex — you sure all four are going down? I mean — man, it’s gonna be an asylum.”
“Well,” Alex said, watching another ghetto blaster approaching, “it wasn’t meant to be a tea party, was it?” Not waiting for an answer, he continued. “By the book, remember. None of your families leave. That’s the first thing they’ll be looking for — a sudden move to another city. All you’ve gotta do is just follow the instructions to the letter and you’ll be okay.”
“Alex?” It was Mike, trying not to look as worried as Stefan, but he was bothered, too. It had come as a bit of a shock. They’d been living with a secret for so long that by now they’d stopped worrying about it ever getting out. And now suddenly they were going to do it. Their lives would never be the same — not after a job this big.
They were approaching Bethesda Terrace, the sun already lost to the skyscrapers. “It’d sure help to know there were others in the same boat,” Mike said. “I mean, I know— yeah, sure we shouldn’t ask.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Alex said. “Are you nuts? Christ, it’s basic. Right, Stefan? Only one of us knows two others— ever. That way we could lose a cell but not the whole group.” Alex cupped his hands to warm them against his mouth. “What is it?” he asked them, sensing a sudden reluctance. “You all want to hold hands? Your wives? You going soft!” He was looking at both Stefan and Mike. “We’ve had perfect cover for over fifteen years, and now you’re going slack-ass on me? Like Gregory?” Gregory was the floater whom the police had found in the East River. “Too old for it?” Alex pressed. “Is that it? Mommy’s boys?”
“Jesus—” Stefan said. “Jesus, Alex. It was — we were only asking.”
Alex turned on him. “Well don’t. Just do your fucking jobs. Or I can send your request for ‘layoff’ to Cheerio.” “Cheerio” was the name they used for Chernko. “He’s got the master list. Knows where everybody lives. We can replace you two quick as I did Gregory. You aren’t the only fish in the tank. We’ve got understudies all me way.”
“Okay, Alex,” Mike said. “Relax. We’re ready to go. No problem.”
“Stefan?” Alex snapped.
“Yeah. Fine, no problem.”
Alex was so angry with Stefan he was about to tell him to clean his goddamn teeth.
When they reached Bethesda Terrace, where the footpath they were on, an extension of East 72nd Street, wound westward, a silence reigned over the three as they approached the winged statue fountain, the water falling from the tapered tier in an uninterrupted veil, the air remarkably clean, a small boy kneeling, trying to crack a thin crust of ice at the edge to put in a sailboat. Alex watched him, automatically looking for any sign that the older man reaching down holding the boy’s jacket was carrying a parabolic pickup mike, using the kid as cover. Even though he knew Mike was carrying a detector, there was always the possibility that its batteries were on the fritz. But then he realized his sudden anxiety was merely a result of Mike and Stefan asking too many questions.
“This is the last meet,” he told them quietly. “After it’s done you fade back into the woodwork.” He told them, if they hadn’t already seen it for themselves, that the ad, like the one for a man in his “early thirties desiring a live-in companion, sexual preference not important, must like cats-no Republicans,” which had activated the Ferrago cell earlier in the war, was now appearing in every major newspaper across the United States. It was Chernko’s “go” signal for Spets “sleepers,” who had so easily infiltrated the U.S. during the KGB’s vershina—”high summer”—of the West’s honeymoon with Yeltsin and the CIS.